Parents on strike

If there is something that most parents worry about, it's being able to offer their children a quality education that will prepare them for adult life. The cuts to the education budget — estimated at nearly six billion euros between 2010 and 2013 — are taking their toll in the classroom, and that is something that families have noticed straight away, to the extent that public schools were faced with a hitherto unseen situation on Thursday: a parent strike to protest the cuts and to defend a quality public education system.

Despite Education Minister José Ignacio Wert's claims that the cuts do not affect the quality of education, parents have seen how this school year started out with fewer teachers and more students per classroom, how assistant teachers disappeared altogether and how there were no substitutes to replace educators who called in sick. Many family economies also felt the adjustments after state subsidies for books and school supplies were drastically slashed. The ministry has admitted that more than 500,000 students will stop receiving this kind of financial help during the course of this year.

The global budget figures clearly show the breadth of the problem. Public spending for this school year (50.45 billion euros) is similar to 2008 levels, yet there are 800,000 more students in the classrooms now. And even though the minister is pretending that the cuts are not increasing the number of students per class, but simply "making it flexible," if there are more students and fewer teachers the concept of flexibility can only be an upward one.

The cutbacks in the public education system also coincide with two emerging but significant trends that had not been anticipated and that are a direct result of the crisis: first, many students who dropped out during the boom years, and are now unemployed, are going back to school; second, growing numbers of students are transferring from private to public schools because their families can no longer afford the additional expense.

This is the situation that has led a significant number of parents — turnout figures, as usual, differ wildly — to express their unhappiness by leaving their kids at home on Thursday. The minister's response was to pour scorn on their concerns and to call them "irresponsible." This minister's statements cause social alarm all too often. First he treated university rectors disdainfully, and the latter stood him up at a May meeting; later he had a confrontation with educators, and now he accuses striking parents of exaggerating the consequences of the cuts and of hurting their own children through the protest. Better manners are expected of an education minister.